Cutting Through The Crap

Friday, September 7, 2012

Clarity

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system – the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.

Barack Obama, 9/6/12

I think President Obama made it pretty clear: Americans have succeeded together, by providing the means for everyone to have a chance. And that the Romney/Ryan/teabaggR approach will leave all that in a ditch, in the name of cutting taxes on the wealthy. It will leave countless kids hungry, millions sicker, reduce access to education, allow our roads and dams and bridges to crumble, make the air less clean... all the things that support progress, all the ways in which a democracy sees that general success depends on lots of individual successes: not important enough to pay for. Because we need to make the currently low taxes on the wealthy even lower. And -- for reasons that absolutely escape me -- we need to spend trillions more on the military than even the military wants.

During every election, I suppose, politicians try to convince people that that election is the most important ever. But this one really is. There couldn't be two more divergent views of what makes America tick than Democrats' versus teabaggRs. To follow the latter is to chose not to pay for anything that helps us together, to have no concern for anyone but oneself, now. It's no exaggeration: there's no way in which that's a misstatement or an overstatement.

Given the obvious truth, is it any wonder that Rs are trying to suppress Democratic voters, and to distract their own voters from focusing on the impact of their plans?

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For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™